Distributed, fault-tolerant communication systems are used in applications where a failure could possibly result in injury or death to one or more persons. Such applications are referred to as “safety-critical applications.” One example of a safety-critical application is in a system that is used to monitor and manage sensors and actuators included in an airplane or other aerospace vehicle. These applications can make use of various network topologies. However, networks that use a time-division multiple access (TDMA) scheme and a network topology that employs a segmented communication medium (such as a ring network topology) are vulnerable to the formation of multiple TDMA “cliques” that form when different parts of the network are powered-on at different times (for example, if two sets of fast nodes are intermingled with and separated by slow nodes).